ElasticVapor - Life in the cloud

Cloud Camp Party Tomorrow Night - San Jose

2008-11-18T20:54:00.002-05:00

I'm happy to announce we're throwing a cloud camp mixer tomorrow night in San Jose (Wed, Nov 19th 7:30pm at Gordon Biersch) Drinks provided by Enomaly, Mosso, Rightscale, and Sun.

With so many Campers in San Jose for CloudComputingExpo, we've decided to find our own time/place to meet. We couldn't find a large enough time slot to put on a formal CloudCamp, but getting together for a few drinks and letting the discussions happen seems like a good enough
reason to meet.

Wednesday night is the best time because the conference sessions end at 7:30pm. Gordon Biersch is just around the corner from the Fairmont Hotel and they’ll give us our own room from 7pm-11pm.

Registration on the website is required. So let us know if you can make it, and come on by!

REGISTER HERE ==> http://www.cloudcamp.com/sanjose

Thanks to Mosso, RighScale, Sun & Enomaly for stepping up and
providing the funds for FREE drinks.

See you there!
Dave, Reuven ... and the rest of the CloudCamp organizers
http://www.cloudcamp.com

Amazon's Global CDN Storm Front

2008-11-18T20:00:00.008-05:00

I've been traveling to California today for some upcoming cloud conferences, so I haven't had a chance to chime in on Amazon's CDN announcement. In case you haven't heard, Amazon Web Services has released their global content delivery service. That service is called Amazon CloudFront and it is ready for public use.

At first glance it looks awesome, a content distribution that uses a single REST-style POST... need I say more. But is it an Akamai killer? That's not so easy to answer. Traditionally most CDN's have been out of reach for the type of users that typical utilize amazon S3. (Smaller websites and startups) So I would say that this new commodity CDN opens a whole new potential market, the small to medium sized websites that until today haven't been able to effectively scale beyond the borders of the North America because simply the legacy CDN's weren't only addressing the needs of the startup.

Amazon says that the CDN service will have initially 14 edge locations (8 in the United States, 4 in Europe, and 2 in Asia) I think the question will be how quickly the large traditional CDN customer base (CNN, MTV, etc) will embrace this type of low cost service. A lot of the customers I've talked to have indicated that Amazon's complete lack of enterprise customer support is one the main reasons they haven't used the other AWS services. Will cost out weigh customer service?

As for the question of whether or not larger enterprises will migrate to Amazon's CDN. I'd say some will and some won't, but at the end of the day, I feel the fortune 5,000,000 is a far bigger opportunity then the traditional enterprise customer and Amazon knows this all too well. CDN providers such as limelight and Akamai's have done a far better job providing a proactive CDN infrastructure that enables a global user base, but at a cost that is out of line with other hosting options. Amazon is a master of the commodity business. Business areas that have slight profit margin seem to be a prefer ed target. Mix in a industry ripe for disruption and you've got a potent combination. Watch out Akamai.

In the short term the key issue will probably be centered around the more cosmetic aspects of a CDN such as the reporting dashboards. In the longer term, just like in EC2, we'll probably start to see a great deal of innovation appearing on top of the Cloud Front service just like the ecosystem that appeared around the other AWS services, which is far more valuable then any single AWS service on it's own. In this ecosystem is Amazon's core advantage.

--
I also recently wrote about the opportunities for the content delivery cloud.

ElasticHosts Launches first KVM based Cloud Service

2008-11-17T10:03:00.004-05:00

ElasticHosts has released what they describe as the first wave of capacity on its UK cloud infrastructure as a public beta. Actually what I find most interesting about this announcement is that ElasticHosts has chosen to use KVM based Virtualization for their offering (KVM=Kernel-based Virtual Machine).

Recently KVM has caught on as a viable open source virtualization solution being adopted by Red Hat and Ubuntu as their preferred hypervisor. For us at Enomaly, we've found KVM to be just simplier and easier to install and configured compared to Xen. One of the biggest limiting factors to the adoption of "private clouds" is in the complexity found within most cloud platforms, ours included. I'd imagine the folks at ElasticHost felt the sameway.

ElasticHosts provides flexible server capacity in the UK to our customers for scalable web hosting, on-demand burst computing and other uses. They claim to be the second publically-available cloud infrastructure to launch outside the US. (Which is arguable)

Key customers benefit from:

- Instantly scalable on-demand server capacity, with a free selection of CPU, memory and disk sizes to suit any application.

- UK data centre, offering fast direct links to the UK/EU internet and ensuring that your data stays within EU jurisdiction and data protection laws. (GeoPolitical Cloud Computing)

- Competitive prices for both subscription and burst use. Buy exactly the capacity you need, when you need it.

- Advanced KVM virtualization technology, delivering the full power of our infrastructure to your servers, and supporting any PC operating system.

Find out more, and sign up for a trial or account at www.elastichosts.com.

Bad Economy? Blame the baby boomers

2008-11-16T22:44:00.005-05:00

Alright I know this post may not win a lot of accolades from the seventy-six million or so Americans who were born between 1946 and 1964. But in my recent conversations I have come to a rather unscientific conclusion. My conclusion is that the current economic crisis is in fact completely and totally the fault of the idealistic baby boomer generation. Yup, you heard it here first, I'm blaming the hippy generation for our current economy.

It would seem to me, (a Generation X'er) that the "boomers" complete disregards for our economic system has created the current economic crisis.

There may have been a combination of factors which may or may not be limited to a few key "boomer" characteristics such as;

sexual freedom thanks in part to Viagra (Your screwing around helped screw the rest of us)
a complete lack of governmental oversight and regulations (Your communist hippy way of government doesn't work)
environmental movement (i.e. boomers fixed the ozone hole and created tonne of green house gases in the process, nice going.)
most importantly the boomers experimentation with various intoxicating recreational substances. (Do you even remember 1969?)

I should also probably note the boomers complete disregard for the "man". Which in case someone forgot to mention, you are now offically "the man" and by being "the man" you get to take all the blame.

Luckily for us Gen Xers, we're not on the verge of retiring, so ironically the baby boomers screwed themselves more then anyone else.

Obama, The First Cybergenic President of America

2008-11-16T18:10:00.004-05:00

In a New York times article back in August, Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley futurist said that if elected, President Elect Barack Obama would become “the first cybergenic president,” just as John F. Kennedy was considered the first telegenic president. (cybergenic meaning internet friendly, telegenic meaning attractive to television viewers)

In my opinion what Obama being elected now means is that for the first time in the history of the American presidency we actually have a leader who understands the context of what the Internet enables not only as a mass communication medium but as a global channel for change.

It's also interesting to look at historical parallels to see the opportunities that embracing new technologies can do for American leaders. Whether it's President Kennedy's simple ability engage 1960s television viewers or how Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War (a book by Tom Wheeler).

Wheeler's book gives a particularly insightful look at how President Lincoln's use of the telegraph trickled down to most parts of his government while also enabling a competitive advantage to his closest advisors and generals. In the book Tom Wheeler gives an example of how General Grant used the telegraph to operate what he called the "General-In-Chief" while traveling with the armies, rather than managing at a distance from Washington D.C. Grant now had the technological advantage to quickly improvise, based upon changing battlefield conditions. I find Wheeler analogy for General Grant perfect for today's president, "His decision to operate from the field would not have been possible but for the army's central nervous system running over telegraph wires." Replace the telegraph with the internet or a blackberry and you can quickly see the importance of how a president knowledgeable in the use of information technology can become a critical tool.

In the 21st century as it was in the 19th century, efficient information management is still a key aspect of how effective you can be in your duties as a Chief Executive, be it of a company or a country. I would argue that it's more important now then it has ever been.

At the end of the day, Obama's use of Internet may may give him a unique opportunity to make significant changes, not only to how American's interact with the government but to how they interact with those who run it.

Information Week Startup Of The Week: Enomaly

2008-11-15T11:50:00.006-05:00

I'm happy to announce that Enomaly is Information Week's startup of the week.

John Foley had this to say: For IT departments that like the idea of cloud computing but are held back by security, governance, or other concerns, Enomaly makes it possible to create cloud-like environments in corporate data centers. The company's Elastic Computing Platform 2.1 originated as an open source project that recently morphed into a commercial offering.

With all the interest in cloud computing, Enomaly seems to have the right product at the right time. It has four years of experience under its belt--mostly as a services company--and some impressive early customers. Yet, Enomaly has only 16 employees, and the management team, though technically deep, is relatively light on experience in the enterprise software market. Potential customers should try before they buy. Download its free software first, then sign an enterprise license if all goes well.

Read the overview at informationweek.com

Cloud.gov - Cloud Computing in the Federal Government

2008-11-14T12:42:00.008-05:00

Had a great trip to Washington DC this week for our first ever Cloud Camp Federal government edition. It was very interesting to see the point of view of so many involved in IT for the US Federal government. We had a great turn out with more then 160 people signing up for the event. What I found most telling was that there seems to be a growing interest in using remote computing services within federal agencies and it's not fore the reasons you'd expect.

One of the recurring questions I kept hearing was that of trust. Can we trust third party providers of computing capacity? The analogy of the traditional phone company such as AT&T was also used quite frequently. We prefer to work with "cloud providers" that we trust. There seems to be the biggest opportunity for those already entrenched in the existing political IT establishment.

The question of security was raised numerous times. It's ranged from the more obvious concerns to the question of data privacy and portability. A group from the DOD said they looked forward to using technologies such as XMPP for the federation of multiple shared private clouds and said interoperability standards should be created.

One of the more interesting comments was that money was not an issue for the more major IT organizations within the federal government. So if you are the DOD, the core benefit to cloud computing wasn't as a cost saving measure but as an efficiency enabler. It sounded to me like just getting VMware into their infrastructure would be a huge win. Not that I completely agree that virtualization is in itself cloud computing, but it was obvious that inefficency in general was a major issue.

For other less critical federal agencies it wasn't that cloud computing wasn't going to happen but that it already was happening. There was an emphasis on none critical services, the so called low hanging fruit. These none core web services provided the best and possibly largest opportunity for cloud computing with in the federal government. Think along the lines of the Whitehouse website or federal information programs. Ways to quickly and easily get the word out.

The spooks in the room also had an interesting take on things. The US is being beaten, and beaten badly by upstart cloud programs coming out of China and Russia and the level of red tape on the beltway was doing more harm then good. Also the concept of Russia being able take control of millions of zombie PC's at moment notice seem to be troubling. Another point of contention was that China has been able to create million server clouds with little or no competition from the US. On the flip side they also assured me that there is a lot more going on, but they couldn't talk about it. It was clear the use of distributed cloud technology represented one of the biggest opportunities within the military IT organizations and the likelihood of some small cloud upstart or even Google or Amazon getting the job was slim.

Needless to say, we're living in some interesting times.

CloudExpo: The World Wide Cloud: Bridging the Data Center and the Cloud

2008-11-12T11:20:00.005-05:00

Come see my live and in person at the International Cloud Computing Expo on Nov. 19 from 4:30 to 5:15 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif. I'll be speaking on the topic of "The World Wide Cloud: Bridging the Data Center and the Cloud."

ABSTRACT

As cloud computing becomes more commonplace, creating a secure method to bridge the gap between existing data centers and remote sources of compute capacity is becoming more and more important. The ability to efficiently and securely tap into remote cloud resources is one of the most important opportunities in the cloud computing today.
In this session, I will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities to deploying across a diverse global cloud infrastructure. Location, security, portability, and reliability, I will explain how they all play critical roles in a scalable IT environment.

I'll probably get way off topic and discuss my other various points of view. So make sure to stop by. If you're interested in meeting up, please ping me as well.

Complex Models & Value of Utility Resources in the Cloud

2008-11-11T17:14:00.002-05:00

Had nice chat today with Joe Weinman from AT&T. He had a very unique take on utility / cloud computing and it's adoption within enterprises. During the conversation he also pointed me to a site Joe put together called Complex Models. The site is a simulation resource intended for a small number of models addressing structure, dynamics, and financial analysis of utility and cloud computing, random graphs, power law preferential attachment graphs, and other simple models that may illustrate complex, emergent characteristics or behavior. If your into playing with model, is a cool site to check out.

I found the Value of Utility Resources in the Cloud particularly interesting.

Check it out at > http://complexmodels.com

Defining Cloud Optimized Storage

2008-11-10T12:42:00.005-05:00

With today's EMC announcement of their cloud optimized storage (COS) platform called Atmos, we are starting to see the first time an enterprise ready attempt at a global cloud storage system. For the most part, these types of global distributed file systems have been what Chuck Hollis at EMC described as home grown solutions built by academics or hobbyists.

Personally, what I found even more interesting then the actual product release was in how they described a new cloud optimized storage market segment.

EMC describes cloud optimized storage as "the ability to access applications and information from a third-party provider—like a large telecommunications company—that has built a global cloud infrastructure. That cloud infrastructure will make massive amounts of unstructured information available on the Web, and will require policy to efficiently disperse the information worldwide."

One of the biggest limitations to the adoption of Atmos is that it isn't open source. Cloud computing is about ubiquity. The more users of your platform the better. I think that ultimately EMC's activity in the cloud storage sector will help drive more interested and demand for cloud storage across the board. I believe that the rising tide floats all boats and my boat has already left the harbor.

To give you some background a while back I came up with a term I described as the "Content Delivery Cloud" I think the approach of EMC's cloud optimized storage fits into this concept very nice.

In partnership with PandoNetworks, we created a joint site promoting this concept at www.contentdeliverycloud.com

Here is an overview:

A Content Delivery Cloud is a system of computers networked together across the Internet that are orchestrated transparently to deliver content to end users, most often for the purposes of improving performance, scalability and cost efficiency. Extending the model of a traditional Content Delivery Network, a Content Delivery Cloud may utilize the resources of end-user computers ("the cloud") to assist in the delivery of content.

Attributes:

Utilizes the unused collective bandwidth of the audience. Every content consumer becomes a server, offloading bandwidth demand from central CDN servers, thus cutting bandwidth costs and boosting media monetization margins.
Improves delivery performance by providing data from a virtually unlimited number of servers in parallel.
Scales with demand. The more consumers demand a particular piece of content, the larger, better performing and more cost efficient that content's delivery cloud becomes.
Benefits all participants in content delivery value chain. To be successful, a Content Delivery Cloud must provide value for the content publisher, the Content Delivery Network, the Internet Service Provider, and the content consumer.
Utilizes a wide range of delivery strategies. Maximize performance and economics by optimally utilizing all available, appropriate data sources, including origin servers, CDN servers, streaming servers, cache servers, and peers. Participants in the delivery cloud can include not only desktop computers but also set top boxes, file servers, mobile devices, and any other Internet enabled device that produces or consumes content.

--
I also wanted to follow up from my previous post on Atmos.

storagezilla said the following.
Atmos is *not* a clustered FS nor does EMC see it as a Isilon or OnTap GX clone/competitor.

Chuck Hollis, VP -- Global Marketing CTO EMC also had some interesting insights.

The traditional storage taxonomy doesn't do a good job of describing what Atmos (and, presumably, future solutions from other vendors) actually does. As you'll see shortly, it isn't SAN, NAS or even CAS. So, what makes "cloud optimized storage" so different? The use of policy to drive geographical data placement.

He goes on to give some more techical details
Is Atmos hardware-agnostic? Yes, that's the design. It runs well as a VMware guest, for example. That being said, our experience with customers so far indicates a strong desire for hardware that's built for purpose -- especially at this sort of scale. Check out the rest of Chucks post to gain a better insight into the usage and deployment of Atmos.

Here are a few more Atmos links as well:

StorageZilla's,
Steve Todd's,
StorageBod,
Chris Mellor at The Register
Network World
Tarry Singh

Cloud Chaos & Decentralization

2008-11-09T00:57:00.013-05:00

In the late nineties and early part of this decade there was a marketing push around the concept of "centralization". Companies like IBM, Oracle and Sun focused on creating hardware and software platforms with single points of deployment and administration in the vain attempt to make it easier manage your infrastructure. It quickly became apparent that for all its marketing hype centralization has created more problems then it has solved.

In nature, most things are not centralized, they are almost always decentralized. Centralization is a human construct used to create structure to an unstructured world. Whether an ant hill or a human body, the Sun or a Galaxy, decentralization and chaos is all around us. Some may see decentralization as anarchy or chaos but in the chaos comes the ability for systems whose states can evolve and adapt over time. These adaptive systems can exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions and may adjust to demands placed on them.

To build scalable cloud platforms the use of decentralized architectures and systems maybe our best option. The cloud must run like a decentralized organism, one without a single person or organization managing it. Like the Internet it should allow 99 percent of its day-to-day operations to be coordinated without a central authority. The Internet is in itself the best example of a scalable decentralized system and should serve as our model.

The general concept of decentralization is to remove the central structure of a network so that each object can communicate as an equal to any other object. The main benefits to decentralization are applications deployed in this fashion tend to be more adaptive and fault tolerant, because a single point of failure is eliminated. On the flip side, they are also harder to shut down and can be slower. For a wide variety of applications decentralization appears to be an ideal model for an adaptive computing environment.

For me, cloud computing is a metaphor for Internet based computing and therefore should be the basis for any cloud reference architectures. In the case of the creation of cloud computing platforms we need to look at decentralization as a way of autonomously coordinating a global network of unprecedented scale and complexity with little or no human management. Through the chaos of decentralization will emerge our best hope for truly scalable cloud environments.
----
This has been a random thought brought to you on a random night.

RumorMill: EMC's Atmos Cloud Optimized Storage Launching Nov 10th

2008-11-08T23:04:00.006-05:00

I just received word from an anonymous source that EMC will be releasing their Cloud Storage Platform on Monday November 10th. It will be a new category of storage called "Cloud Optimized Storage". The release will be named "Atmos" short for Atmosphere and was previously referred to as "Maui".

According to previous details, Maui is to be a clustered file system software that will compete with Isilon's OneFS or NetApp's OnTap GX.

In November 2007, EMC CEO Joe Tucci said this: "Maui is well beyond a clustered file system, but will incorporate some of the things a clustered file system does," somewhat vaguely, during a keynote at an EMC Innovation Day event.

According to my source the final features for Atmos will include the following:

Massively scalable infrastructure
- Petabyte scale
- Global footprint

All-in-one data services
- Replication, Versioning
- Compression, Spin-down,
- De-duplication
- Advanced metadata support, Indexing
- Powerful access mechanisms

Intelligent data management
- Personalized by metadata and policy
- Auto-configuring when capacity is added
- Auto-healing when failures occur
- Auto-managing content placement

Cost effective hardware
- Industry standard building blocks
- Modular packaging
- User-serviceable components

---- BENEFITS ----

Reduces complexity of global content distribution
- Policy based intelligence for objects and tenants

Single tier easy to manage
- Auto-configuring, auto-healing, browser-based interface

Infinitely scalable
- Multi-petabytes, multi-site, multi-tenant

Easily to integrate and extend
- REST and SOAP API’s, NFS, CIFS, IFS

Easy to configure and expand
- Single-entity, global namespace, No RAID, No LUNs

Cost compelling content store, dispersion and archive
- Standard hardware, economy of scale

According to my source, EMC also has a few more products for the cloud but the source couldn't say anymore about it.
--

V for Vendetta

2008-11-08T12:05:00.004-05:00

My favorite antagonist Sam Johnston who infamously called for a boycott of Enomaly has been helping us find security holes in our Enomaly ECP. Fueled on a potent mix of rage and red bull Sam has been busy trying to find ways to exploit ECP. One of the great reasons for using an open source model is for exactly this reason. Anyone be it a friend or foe can assist with the discovery of security vunrabilites.

Sam's security exploit is relativly minor and should not effect anyone with decent dom0 access rules. We currently use random filenames that are pretty hard to guess and if an un-authorized user were to gain access to the Dom0, you'd probably have bigger issues to deal with. So this really only effects "trusted" dom0 users. The resolution is don't give out dom0 access to untrusted users, which is probably a good idea anyway. The whole purpose of ECP is to abstract resources so you don't have to give that level of access to core system resources. The next release of Enomaly ECP will address this issue.

Here is Sam's Full post.

Enomaly ECP/Enomalism: Insecure temporary file creation vulnerabilities

Synopsis

All versions of Enomaly ECP/Enomalism use temporary files in an insecure
manner, allowing for symlink and command injection attacks.

2. Impact Information

Background

Enomaly ECP (formerly Enomalism) is management software for virtual machines.

Description

Sam Johnston of Australian Online Solutions reported that enomalism2.sh uses
the /tmp/enomalism2.pid temporary file in an insecure manner.

Impact

A local attacker could perform a symlink attack to overwrite arbitrary files
on the system with root privileges, or inject arguments to the 'kill' command
to terminate or send arbitrary signals to any process(es) as root.

Exploits

a. ln -s /tmp/target /tmp/enomalism2.pid
b. echo "-9 1" > /tmp/enomalism2.pid

-
Never under estimate the power of a vendetta. Thanks Sam, let me know if there is anything I can do in return.

Whurley named 2008’s “Best Evil Genius”

2008-11-08T10:57:00.003-05:00

William Hurley, aka Whurley is a visionary systems theorist, skateboarder and now best evil genius as awarded by the Austin Chronicle. Whurley and I go way back, he was one of the first guys to reach out and has been leading the efforts to form an open source community among Austin tech geeks. The chief architect of open-source strategy at BMC Software and the man behind BarCampAustin as well as being critical to helping me get Cloud Camp off the group. Whurley is all about connecting people and encouraging involvement in collaborative projects so great things can happen.

Way to go dude!

Cisco 3.0 and the future of cloud computing

2008-11-07T21:21:00.006-05:00

It's been a big week for Cisco and their activities in Cloud Computing. On Wednesday and Thursday they held their first ever "Cisco Cloud Computing Research Symposium" (C3RS) in San Jose, which they described a forum to stimulate conversation and exchange of ideas with the intent of laying out the main open lines of research in Cloud Computing. The by-invitation-only event, which I had the honored of beening invited to, but sadly could not attend ,focused on cloud technology and its impact on the Internet of the future. (And specifically how Cisco was going to make a tonne of cash off major customers such as Bank of America who are rumored to be in the process of rolling out a major private cloud with them)

In a separate conversation, Cisco's Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior spoke to a group at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. During her panel, Warrior outlined Cisco's vision for the cloud saying that cloud computing will evolve from private and stand-alone clouds to hybrid clouds, which allow movement of applications and services between clouds, and finally to a federated "intra-cloud."(Guess she reads my blog, Padmasree call me I'll hook you up with an intra-cloud)

She seems like the term intra-cloud, which actually isn't that bad. She elaborated with this tidbit: "We will have to move to an 'intra-cloud,' with federation for application information to move around. It's not much different from the way the Internet evolved. It will take us a few years to get there. We have to think about security and load balancing and peering," she said. "Flexibility and speed at which you can develop and deploy applications are the basic advantages that will drive this transformation."

During the same conference panel, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, said that compatibility at the cloud platform layer is a problem. "The level of lock-in in the cloud in terms of applications running and data aggregation is at a risky juncture right now in terms of continuity," I actually agree with Lynch, Adobe's cloud efforts have been some of the most locked down out of most of the major players.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff went back into his vision for integration between his Force.com platform and Google and Facebook as an example of the way cloud services can be mashed up. "It's an unclear area of the law as to who owns what." (Don't get me started on this one, I smell BS a mile away. Marc your customers own their data, how many times do i have to tell you this!)

At the end of the day all the major players love to talk about interoperability and federation. VMware with there Vcloud is prime example of interop-vapor. Hey look, we're interoperable, just as long as your using VMware. But in the end action still speaks louder the words and for now it's just words.

Busy as a beaver.

2008-11-07T17:13:00.002-05:00

Just quick post to let everyone know I've been swamped with Enomaly related activity.So my posts may be sparse over next couple weeks (Like my favorite type of file system) Lots of new announcements coming including "my cloud dream team" board of advisors and some new partnership deals. I'll keep you posted.

Cloudwars: Is Salesforce Evil or Stupid?

2008-11-06T13:12:00.003-05:00

After my post earlier today on Salesforce delusional state, it would seem they keep adding fuel to the fire. The Silicon Valley Watcher is reporting that Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce wasn't too pleased when he found out SugarCRM was hosting its user conference at the Marriott, just a few yards from the Salesforce Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.

John Roberts, the CEO of SugarCRM, had this to say: "When Marc Benioff found out we were at the Marriott he pressured the hotel to move us out. That's how we ended up here at the St. Regis, and Marriott is paying for it."

Nice.

(More details: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2008/11/sugarcrm_the_li.php)

MIT Technology Review: Opening the Cloud

2008-11-06T09:26:00.003-05:00

Erica Naone , has written a nice piece on Open-source cloud-computing tools that could give companies greater flexibility. She has graciously included me as a contributor.

Here's my piece;

Reuven Cohen, founder and chief technologist of Enomaly, explains that an open-source cloud provides useful flexibility for academics and large companies. For example, he says, a company might want to run most of its computing in a commercial cloud such as that provided by Amazon but use the same software to process sensitive data on its own machines, for added security. Alternatively, a user might want to run software on his or her own resources most of the time, but have the option to expand to a commercial service in times of high demand. In both cases, an open-source cloud-computing interface can offer that flexibility, serving as a complement to the commercial service rather than a replacement.

Read the whole article here > http://www.technologyreview.com/web/21642/

Salesforce's Dreamland: Data Portability, Interoperability and Cloud Monopolies

2008-11-05T23:41:00.008-05:00

It's been an interesting week for Salesforce.com Chief executive Marc Benioff. During a presentation at Salesforce Dreamforce delusion, sorry conference. The Salesforce chief called for the creation of cloud interoperability standards for moving data between applications in rival clouds. Which on the surface appears to be a great step forward. Problem is he was very quick to contradict himself.

During a followup, Benioff called platform lock in an inevitable part of the industry and said vendors should be more honest. Customers know that when they pick Salesforce .com, they are making a "strategic relationship," he said. In that regard, it's no different to what's been happening for decades with Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM.

(So if IBM, Oracle and Microsoft were to jump from a bridge... I think we know where salesforce would be)

So Marc which is it? Are you for data portability and cloud interoperability or are you for vendor lock in? It would seem that for all intensive purposes he seems to favor the latter.

In a recent post by Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu. Sridhar paints a very worrysome picture. In his post he goes on to say: "Salesforce has repeatedly tried to block customers from migrating to Zoho CRM, by telling them (falsely) that they cannot take their data out of Salesforce until their contract duration is over. We have emails from customers recounting this."

This seem pretty odd for a guy promoting interoperability. Marc's stance on cloud interoperability is almost as confusing as trying to follow the recent back and forth between Hugh MacLeod, Nick Carr and Tim O'Reilly's wildly crazy epic on cloud monopolies. To sum things up, they went into some kind of deluded tangent on the definition of the network effect while attempting to draw parallels to the effect that one user of a cloud or service has on the value of that cloud to other users or something like that. (While I'm on my own tangent, the hype around Cloud Computing itself is the network effect in action.)

Back to the topic at hand, I think this quote from Marc Benioff is the most telling for Salesforces interoperability plans."Larry Ellison is my mentor. He is a tremendous leader in the industry. He still owns 5% of our company. Now that I've said that, he also studies the Art of War."

James Governor, response to Hugh MacLeod said it best. "Customers always vote with their feet, and they tend vote for something somewhat proprietary - see Salesforce APEX and iPhone apps for example. Experience always comes before open. Even supposed open standards dorks these days are rushing headlong into the walled garden of gorgeousness we like to call Apple Computers."

(Yup, myself included writing this on my Mac Book Pro, Os X)

My suggestion for people considering salesforce or any other cloud platform is to not only look at how easily you can get up and running, but to also consider how easily you can move or get your data back again. For cloud computing (aka internet based computing) to ultimately become a viable main stream computing option, I feel we have no choice but to embrace both data portability and cloud interoperability standards so that the entire industry may flourish.

And by the way, Marc Benioff, monopolies are so 1995.

Cloud Taxonomy - Cluster F*ck

2008-11-05T10:40:00.005-05:00

I've been working on the cloud taxonomy section for my cloud guide. Adam, one of our developers here at Enomaly recommended a new term.

Cluster Fuck - 1. Total cluster failure. 2. Your entire cloud has gone down. 3. Epic Internet failure.
--

Press: Cloud Computing Tools For Managing Amazon, Google Services

2008-11-05T09:25:00.001-05:00

Some more press for Enomaly, also a great overview of some cloud management tools. (Elastra, Coghead, Heroku, Enomaly, and Hyperic CloudStatus. )

See the whole article at InformationWeek.